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Need Help Resolving WHS Drive Failure RRS feed

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    I have a home-built Windows Home Server that is having a drive failure problem and Im afraid I may lose some data if Im not careful.  The system had four drives installed, all part of the storage pool.  The largest of the drives appears to have failed this week, and the system was exhibiting some strange hardware conflicts (other drives appearing to fail, inconsistent behavior).  I have the system now in a usable state with the failed drive disconnected, here is the arrangement:

    Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB SATA - Missing
    Maxtor STM3500630A 500GB ATA - Healthy
    Samsung HD642JJ 620GB SATA - Healthy
    Maxtor STM3500630A 500GB ATA - Healthy (System drive)

    My data, without counting duplication, should fit on the remaining 1.62TB of storage, so Im hoping that nothing should be lost by losing this one big 1.5TB drive. 

    Booting up the system now, and opening the WHS console, the Network status is marked as "Critical".  The dialog that opens tells me that my drive has failed, and shows one yellow indicator about a file conflict in my Music shared folder.  My Server Storage tab shows one missing drive and three healthy drives, and the Server Storage pie chart on the right is working to calculate sizes to render the chart.  My Shared folders tab showss that all my shares are healthy but one, the Music share, which says "Failing (Check Health)", assuming this is related to the file conflict warning.

    Leaving the system running, I assume that WHS is trying to shuffle files around or clean things up on its own, and the server storage graph is still trying to calculate sizes (progress bar still running)... coming back about a half hour later, I see that six of my shared folders are listed as "Failing (Check Health)", my three remaining drives are still showing up as "Healthy", my size graph is still tryng to calculate, and when I click the Network status icon, the dialog now shows yellow file conflict errors in all six of my "Failing" shared folders.  All of the file conflict errors say that the conflict is "A device attached to the system is not functioning".

    I then tried to access files in some of my shared folders that are marked as "Failing" from a separate computer on the home network.  Success is hit-and-miss, some files work, some files dont.  I can see all my files just fine in Windows Explorer, they show file names and folder structure as I would expect, including file sizes.  But I cant open many of the files, I just get errors when the application tries to read them.

    A few minutes later... now all of my Shared Folders are listed as "Failing (Check Health)" and there are file conflict alerts for every share, whether it has files in it or not (some of my shares are empty).

    Not sure which step to take next... should I try to Remove the missing disk from the Server Storage (the wizard warns me about losing files if I do this).  Should I add a new drive first before removing the missing drive from the pool?  Have I lost my data?  is there some way to rebuild the database that knows where my files are stored, assuming there is at least one copy left of each file on my three remaining healthy drives?

    Thanks very much!
    • Edited by AlphaGeekboy Friday, February 5, 2010 8:38 PM typos, minor edits
    Friday, February 5, 2010 8:34 PM

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    No, it doesn't have to be equivalent. But you should have a size enough to store the remaining of your storage pool, basically whatever part of data that disk stored. Suggest you add the new disk first and then remove the old disk, that way WHS itself will migrate data as necessary.

    You will not lose data that is duplicated. WHS will check for enough storage space to allow for all data to be duplicated to other disks.
    Saturday, February 6, 2010 12:16 AM
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    Windows Home Server always sends you to the "primary" file shadow for access. If that file shadow is on a failed drive, you get the error you're seeing.

    It doesn't clean up tombstones because a failed drive is usually "missing", which only means that the operating system can't communicate with it. But an external USB drive that's accidentally disconnected will also be "missing". So a health alert is raised, but if the drive is just temporarily disconnected you really don't want Windows Home Server rearranging the storage pool (and possibly raising other errors as a result, if there's not enough space left for duplication without the missing drive).
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Saturday, February 6, 2010 7:38 PM
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    I think your best bet is to add a drive (a new 1.5 TB drive, for instance) to your storage pool, then remove the failed drive from the pool. 

    As for data loss: If you have duplication on for all of your shares, you shouldn't lose anything there. You may lose files from shares without duplication, however. You may also lose backups (the backup database is a number of files which aren't duplicated). If you have any add-ins installed, and if those add-ins use Windows Home Server-supplied tools (called "application folders") to maintain their data, you may also lose some data there, because the add-in can choose whether or not to enable duplication on it's own application folder.

    As for rebuilding a database, there isn't one. Files on your server are stored as normal files, in a normal NTFS file system. All you will do by adding and removing drives is allow Windows Home Server to determine whether any files had a "shadow" on the failed drive, and recreate that shadow on another drive (if duplication was on, otherwise the file is lost as I said above).
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Friday, February 5, 2010 9:11 PM
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    do I need to replace the missing drive with a drive of the equivalent size?  and do I have to add a new drive before removing the missing drive?  does it matter which step comes first?

    if I just remove the missing drive from the pool, will I lose any data on the folders where I had duplication enabled?  I would assume not, Id assume that the system would just tell me that it doesnt have room to enable duplication and that the original files are still safe.

    Thanks!!!
    Friday, February 5, 2010 10:03 PM
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    No, it doesn't have to be equivalent. But you should have a size enough to store the remaining of your storage pool, basically whatever part of data that disk stored. Suggest you add the new disk first and then remove the old disk, that way WHS itself will migrate data as necessary.

    You will not lose data that is duplicated. WHS will check for enough storage space to allow for all data to be duplicated to other disks.
    Saturday, February 6, 2010 12:16 AM
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    I will buy a new drive, add it, then remove the missing drive from the pool.  Hope that works :)

    My only remaining question is... why doesnt WHS clean up it's tombstones to point to the remaining/good files when a drive fails?  im still getting a LOT of files that wont work, even though I can see them in Windows Explorer.  Its like WHS is still pointing at copies of files that were on the failed drive instead of redirecting to the other shadow copy on one of the remaining drives.  Is this normal/expected behavior?

    Thanks again for all your help!
    Saturday, February 6, 2010 5:20 PM
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    Windows Home Server always sends you to the "primary" file shadow for access. If that file shadow is on a failed drive, you get the error you're seeing.

    It doesn't clean up tombstones because a failed drive is usually "missing", which only means that the operating system can't communicate with it. But an external USB drive that's accidentally disconnected will also be "missing". So a health alert is raised, but if the drive is just temporarily disconnected you really don't want Windows Home Server rearranging the storage pool (and possibly raising other errors as a result, if there's not enough space left for duplication without the missing drive).
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Saturday, February 6, 2010 7:38 PM
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    I am curious to know what happened to Ex-MSFTguy's setup after he/she added a new drie and then removed the old drive. I have just made a home-built WHS and it is now nicely backing up my 3 PCs and of course, I have put all the media files into duplicated shares. Will be adding a UPS to the server in a couple of days. Worried about server drive failures - particularly learnt that the seagate 1.5TB drives that I have put as data drives, have had bad reviews in many places...

    cheers

     

    Tuesday, April 6, 2010 8:19 AM
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    If it is a server disk failure, you'd need to do a server recovery. The manual method would be a clean install (on one disk only) and manually moving your data over
    Tuesday, April 6, 2010 8:44 PM
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    Hi there,

    I dropped in the new drive, and after a long process, the server corrected itself and all the files were recovered. 

    Monday, April 12, 2010 4:05 PM
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    hurray, glad it worked for you!! Congrats Ex-MSFTguy. Relief for me that WHS is a true server.

     

    I have had my laptop's drive get corrupted a couple of times now (most likely failing lenovo system), but everytime, thanks to WHS backing up my laptop, I have been able to re-image the entire system (500GB Drive, 40% full) from the WHS. WHS rocks!!

    Friday, October 22, 2010 7:16 AM